coda

I had a growth cut from my lower eyelid, a bump I've had since I was a teen. A freckle had appeared and testing urged. So my eyeball was numbed, the lids clamped open and the bottom rim pierced twice with Novocaine. A real Clockwork Orange scene. The opthamologist went to work. Slicing through the growth, scissoring down a flap and cauterizing the wound. I watched a thin ribbon of smoke curl toward the ceiling and disappear. Then he undid the clamp, dripped antibiotic in my eye and rubbed ointment on the lid. He held up a mirror. Puffy and red as if I'd been sucker-punched. But the bump was gone. Riding my lower left eyelid for more than twenty years, changing the shape of my horizon -- gone, off to the pathologist's lab. You’re good to go, the doctor said.

A few minutes later, I stepped into the sunlit parking lot, one eyeball without feeling, vision smeared like Vaseline on a windshield. But I looked forward to being temporarily half-affected by the world around me – the homeless woman I drove past at the interchange would perhaps only strike me half as sad, the father berating his kid in the next car half as harsh, television reports on government abuses half as depressing. Passing disturbances. Instead, my good eye wept twice as hard. A flow of tears I tissued while steering through mid-morning traffic on Shelburne Road. And I couldn't have been more glad for it.